A roundup of maps of venues and facilities for the 2024 Paris Olympics from competitive swimming website Swim Swam; the maps are small and mostly sourced from social media. The map on the Paris 2024 website is interactive, comprehensive and confusing: a case of doing everything but nothing well.
Tag: France
Apple Maps Roundup for July 2023
Downloadable maps are coming to Apple Maps in iOS 17 this fall. Ars Technica looks at how they’ll work, and how they’ll compare to Google Maps’ offline maps (at the moment—which to be sure is with the iOS 17 public beta—Apple’s offline maps take up much more space but also offer more detail).
James Killick considers Apple’s forthcoming Vision Pro headset and wonders whether something might not be afoot in the mapping space. “The real kicker for geospatial is its ability to immerse you in a truly 3D experience. […] So given a truly immersive 3D experience is possible, think of the wonders it will do for maps and mapping in general.”
After expanding its new maps to central Europe—Austria, Croatia, Czechia, Hungary, Poland and Slovenia—in April, Apple brought detailed city maps to Paris, cycling directions to the whole of France, and its new maps to Hong Kong, Taiwan and Slovakia in June. As usual, Justin O’Beirne has all the details at the above links.
A Huge, Super-Expensive Edition of the Cassini Map
French publisher Conspiration Éditions has announced the forthcoming publication of a huge, luxury edition of the Cassini map. The 18th-century map is, famously, the first comprehensive map of France, and the first map to be based on triangulation. Their edition is enormous: at 56 × 65 cm (or 22 × 25.6 inches), it’s big enough to show each plate as a two-page spread at full size (Conspiration is reprinting a hand-coloured original apparently owned by Marie-Antoinette). At 15 kg (33 lbs), the book is also pretty heavy, and includes a foldable stand. It is, however, not remotely cheap: it’s being published in a limited edition of 900 copies that will be released for sale in April 2024 at the rather stunning price of €2,400; 300 copies can be purchased before the end of October 2023 at the low, low subscription price of €1,800.
Previously: La Carte de Cassini.
Pierre Novat, French Painter of Ski Resort Panoramas
Pierre Novat (1928-2007) was another painter of panoramic mountain and ski resort maps working with the same techniques as Henrich Berann and James Niehues. Novat actually predates Niehues, and even Niehues’s mentor Bill Brown: his career ran from the early 1960s until his retirement in 1999. He mainly focused on French ski resorts; for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville he pained a panorama of all the Savoie venues. In March 1992, France 3 aired this profile of Novat that explored his process; the above video relates to a 2014 exposition of his work. (All links in French; see this 2014 blog post from the Ski Adventures blog for something in English.)
Chronotrains 1911
Benjamin Tran Dinh’s interactive isochrone map of Europe showing how far you can go by train in five hours (previously) has a new variant that does the same thing for 1911 France. Getting closer in time and place to those original isochrone maps. [Maps Mania]
Apple Maps Updates: France, Monaco, New Zealand
Justin O’Beirne reports that Apple’s new map data has now launched in France, Monaco and New Zealand. Meanwhile, cycling directions have expanded to cover all U.S. states except Hawaii.
A Striped Circle Map of the French Presidential Election Results
Julien Gaffuri’s map of the second-round results of the French presidential election is, as you can see, extraordinarily busy—and, by the way, extremely processor-intensive: it will slow down your machine—because it’s at the commune level and each circle is scaled to population. (News flash: Paris has lots of people in it.) And those circles are striped circles: the proportion of the votes is indicated by the area taken up by a given colour. The map of the first round results shows more stripes (because more candidates) but is by department, so it’s a little easier both to read and to see how the striped circle format works. It’s an interesting alternative to a choropleth map, and a bit less ambiguous.
2022 French Presidential Election (Second Round)
France 24’s interactive map (right) covers both first and second rounds and shows results by region, department and commune. It is annoyingly unlabelled, which is a surprising choice for France’s English-language news service. Le Monde’s map uses a similar colour scheme—yellow/orange for Macron, grey/brown for Le Pen—but at least has mouseover labels.
Le Parisien’s maps aren’t interactive, nor are they particularly large, but they illustrate other aspects of the results, like the abstentions, voter turnout and differences vs. the 2017 vote. The Guardian’s maps are low on detail but provide similar information. Libération’s map, on the other hand, is a cluttered mess, showing each commune as a proportionally sized dot. [Maps Mania]
Previously: 2022 French Presidential Election (First Round).
2022 French Presidential Election (First Round)
Some maps showing the results of the first round of France’s 2022 presidential election. Le Monde’s interactive map shows the winner by commune: it has all the caveats you’d expect from a geographical map (the cities have a lot of voters but not much territory, making Le Pen’s rural support look more impressive). Bloomberg’s maps are behind a paywall: see this Twitter thread instead, which has maps of the regional concentrations of each candidate’s support. (With a dozen candidates on the ballot, it’s hard to get a true picture from a single map.) Also on Twitter, Dominic Royé’s dasymetric maps of the results [Maps Mania].
Previously: Mapping the 2017 French Presidential Election (First Round).
La Pérouse’s Expeditions
The Library of Congress’s Carissa Pastuch has a blog post about the Pacific Ocean expeditions of Jean-François de Galaup La Pérouse, and the maps that resulted from them—including the above map by Buache de Neuville, made in 1785 so that Louis XVI could follow La Pérouse’s progress.
French Rail Services as Network Diagram
Metropolitan France—mainland France without Corsica and its overseas territories—is often referred to colloquially as l’Hexagone. Jug Cerovic, whose work we are familiar with here, has taken that metaphor and run with it with this network diagram of France’s main passenger train lines: the grid is hexagonal, and it works. Lines are colour-coded: TGV lines are blue if they start in Paris and red if they route around it or connect regions directly (a relatively new development; intercity lines are blue-grey, regional lines are orange, and night trains are grey. International routes are also included. It’s actually quite easy to see what cities and towns get what kind of train service, and what services exist between two points—exactly what a network map should do.
The Incredibly Granular Maps of Data.Pour.Paris
Data.Pour.Paris is a collection of interactive maps about the city of Paris. It’s a lot more interesting—and granular—than it appears at first glance, though. The traffic and real-time metro maps you might expect, but the map of street lights drills down to individual streetlights—and their wattage. Public order complaints are mapped individually, and there’s even a map of the 2018 Paris marathon that tracks the progress of individual runners. They’re the work of French engineer Benjamin Tran Dinh, and they’re neat. They speak as much to the availability of such data as the ability to map it. [Maps Mania]
Previously: Le Grand Paris en Cartes.
An Exhibition of Maps of the Imagination in Strasbourg
An exhibition at BNU Strasbourg, Hors du Monde: La Carte et l’Imaginaire, explores the role of imagined places on maps, from monsters on Renaissance maps to California-as-an-island to fantasy maps. The press dossier (PDF; in French) serves as a fairly detailed guide. Opened 18 May; runs until 20 October 2019. Admission 3€.
Three Men Arrested for Map Thefts in France
Three men have been arrested for stealing approximately €20,000 worth of maps from municipal libraries in France, Le Parisien reports (in French). The men were arrested near Béziers after an investigation that began after an aborted attempt at stealing from Avignon’s municipal library. Between late 2018 and early 2019 the men managed to steal at least five 15th- or 16th-century maps from libraries in Limoges, Auxerre and Le Mans; the maps have not yet been recovered. [Tony Campbell]
Mapping Natural Disasters in France
In response to the latest round of flash floods in France, The Local has a piece looking at natural disasters in France that points to a set of interactive maps from France Info (in French; page doesn’t work well in Safari) that show the number of natural disasters, by commune, since 1982, as well as the number of disasters due to flooding and drought. The maps indicate where the disaster hot spots are in France and (to some extent) where they aren’t: only 3.5 percent of French communes have never had a disaster declaration in that period. Sixty percent of the disasters were due to flooding; The Local also points to the Global Flood Map: zooming in sufficiently shows the zones for high and moderate risk of flooding. [Gretchen Peterson]